The general risk-adverse vs. change-oriented paradigm makes a lot of sense. The problem is that it not limited to the technical realm in most organizations. Te

The general risk-adverse vs. change-oriented paradigm makes a lot of sense. The problem is that it not limited to the technical realm in most organizations. Technology decisions often need to be justified by management who don't necessarily use purely technical criteria for their choices. Some rather simple criteria can be used to group languages - age and popularity. Perl, JavaScript, Java, Visual Basic are conservative in that they are popular, well known, established languages (even though they cross the Yegge's whole spectrum). Haskell, while extremely conservative technically, is extremely liberal in many organizations - where there are no currently implemented projects using the language and no programmers experienced using it.